The Internet had wrapped its long and spindly tentacles around my face once again, infiltrating every available orifice and slowly making its way into my tender brain. I had given up resisting its insipid charm, resolving instead to follow the rabbit deeper into the hole to whatever Wikipedia page or silly video was deemed fit by others who had stumbled along my path before me. Mine was a path of least resistance.
The Internet was my ally after all, my informative and entertaining bunk mate, ever eager to provide everything I could ever want. From illegally streaming Seinfeld episodes to finding out what malt is and why it’s in some beer and some milkshakes, but not all beer and not all milkshakes, the Internet provides.
The Internet also continues to deliver me these “emails” and every once in awhile I receive “emails” that I open before deleting.
One such “email” informed me that an interview was to be conducted between Craig Robinson (Matheson from Pineapple Express, and “hay, zat guy’z on The Office lolz!”) and Clark Duke (“I feel like I saw this guy on the Internet once”) and one lucky College Voice writer to discuss the upcoming film Hot Tub Time Machine. I pounced on my keyboard and pounded out my demands with its tiny white keys: “I’m feelin’ lucky, sign me up.”
Now bear in mind, every time you sign up for something on the Internet, you become immediately swamped with rigmarole.
You think to yourself, “Hey! I am between the ages of 20 and 21, and I do want unlimited Pizza Hut for Life! How the heck do they know me so well?” You click, and you have to enter endless amounts of information about yourself into tiny white boxes instead of enjoying gooey delicious pizza, my experience was similar.
I began a grueling “email war” with a woman named Sarah who continuously asked me to confirm times and dates.
She was apparently a “representative of the company” producing Hot Tub Time Machine, a film released March 26th and starring the two men I was now bound to speak with, as well as 80’s fixture John Cusack and The Daily Show’s Rob Courdry. Eventually I established a cease-fire with Sarah’s email barrage and waited with bated breath for the phone call that would change my life.
Now, undoubtedly you’ve seen ads for this movie, but if you’re not the observant type, it appears to be about a Hot Tub that’s also a Time Machine. Four silly men hop in and travel to 1986 where everything is sooo 80’s (neon spandex and jerry curls, for example)!
Clearly, these are people who have a rich understanding of comedy as a reflection of the human experience and therefore I was as giddy as a schoolgirl when the day finally arrived for me to speak with them.
As soon as I logged into the conference call I realized that I was not the only one who had suffered endless months of email confirmations from Sarah, but in reality there were roughly ten other college reporters on the call gnashing their teeth and hoping to bite off a chunk of the talent. We waited tensely like racehorses in our starting pens as a man who never identified himself inquired who had logged on to the call every minute or so. The anticipation was almost too much!
Finally, when the nameless man was satisfied, we were patched through to a woman serving as arbiter of the whole ordeal and the two comedians of demi-fame.
We were instructed to wait until our school name was called, as if we had been branded beyond individuality by our respective institutions, and then we would be permitted to ask one (1) question. I suppose they had anticipated a rousing blood bath of stabbing queries as each reporter fought to be heard over the din of the truth being sought, so instead there was a kind of stingy Genie like quality to the interview as instead of wishes we were granted questions and instead of three we were granted one (1). Now that’s journalism!
Suffolk led the pack with the first question, he wanted to know how much input Craig had on “all the 80’s stuff.” Craig assured him that the producers of the film had made sure to check what “stuff” was from the “80’s” and what was not.
The second question came from a woman who really got the interview cooking, she wanted to know if “the director had any, like, improv during, like, the acting and stuff.” Craig responded positively, ignoring the obvious grammatical flaws in her question, saying he believed, “the majority of the movie was improv.”
What this says about the writers of the movie I’m not sure, perhaps the script was just a series of suggestions and rough ideas. Then again the movie is called Hot Tub Time Machine.
After a few more pressing questions regarding the “80’s” it came to be my turn, I was interested in what they thought was the most viable medium for creative comedy in this day and age where audiences have access to internet, television, film, live performance and the like.
Clark Duke regarded the inquiry quite dourly, stating that for writers television was a better medium, but that actors might find film more rewarding as it allowed for more improv.
I pressed him, inquiring about time constraints and how they effected the amounts of improv in certain mediums, but he continued to be very closed up as an orator, reiterating at least three times that it “depends on the show or movie.”
My sense was that he had been briefed on how to talk about Hot Tub Time Machine, but really didn’t give too much thought to comedy as a larger genre. His work with Michael Cera on their Internet show Clark and Michael indicates just this limited scope as a comedian. He frequently relies on awkward pauses to get laughs and focuses on deadpanned, minimalist plots in which he exerts little to no energy.
Similar to Michael Cera’s style of mousy awkwardness, Clark seems to end up playing a straight man for more outgoing, active comedians to bounce off of in all of his bits. Interestingly, he is the only character in Hot Tub Time Machine who wasn’t even alive in 1986, forcing him to be even further off the radar.
Craig weighed in with some more concrete comments, making reference to the “ADD mentality” that most consumers have in the modern day.
“There’s just so many resources to go find comedy like Funny or Die and Youtube,” Craig said, “so, yeah, it’s raising the stakes and the game because now it depends on a lot of word-of-mouth, you know, trying to get videos to go viral. So, the internet has definitely changed the face of comedy.”
The accessibility of a timer on Internet comedy also has an effect on how popular it is. The “ADD” aspect has turned a video longer than five minutes into “too long,” which affects the type of sketches or characters that get developed. Punch lines and bits have to emerge early on in a sketch or they’ll be dismissed as “not funny.”
This isn’t to say that the Internet is necessarily a bad influence on comedy, as it also allows fresh faces to get “discovered” much more easily than in the days before instant communication. Think of all the little kids yelling, fat people falling down the stairs and frat boys yelling and falling down the stairs you never would have seen without the Internet.
Think about any movie or music video, and then remember that you could find a parody of it RIGHT NOW. Then you could share any of those videos with any of your friends, or anyone you don’t even know. You could send them a message, personally or publically, while you’re still watching it for the first time. That’s what the Internet has allowed us.
The future of comedy is in the hands of the people. The people make it, the people consume it. Now we decide what we think is funny.
Do we honestly think a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine sounds like the future of comedy? Are we going to support it as a testimony of what the people of 2010 can accomplish in the field of funnies? Will we shell out our 8 to 12 dollars and see it in theaters? Will we stream it bootlegged on the Internet? Will we be sucked in again by the mindless cogs of Orcs who run the steamy inner sanctums of the information super highway? Is there an end to the treadmill from hell they call “email chains”? Is there anything better to do?
